PhonePe To Hire 20,000 Sales Staff, Deploy 5 Million Payment Devices Across Rural India

PhonePe announced plans on Thursday to significantly expand its footprint in rural India, saying it will hire more than 20,000 additional frontline sales employees and deploy over 5 million payment devices across the country over the next 12 months.

A Rural-First Hiring Push

The new hires will join PhonePe's payroll as on-roll sales staff, a distinction the company emphasised in its announcement, rather than being brought on through third-party contractors, a common practice in merchant-acquisition roles across India's fintech sector. Their primary job will be to reach merchants in smaller towns and villages who have not yet been onboarded to digital payments, walk them through KYC verification, install payment devices and provide ongoing support once they are live.

Roughly half of the 5 million-plus payment devices PhonePe plans to deploy, a mix of SmartSpeakers that announce transactions aloud and point-of-sale machines, will be directed at rural geographies, including what the company refers to internally as Tier 6 towns, the smallest tier in India's urban classification system. The push signals a shift in priority toward geographies that have historically had far lower digital payment penetration than metro and Tier 1 cities, where UPI adoption is already close to saturation.

What Is Funding The Expansion

PhonePe pointed to its recently finalised Merchant Discount Rate framework as a key enabler of the investment, saying the new MDR structure gives the company more predictable revenue and allows it to take a longer-term view on merchant expansion rather than optimising purely for short-term transaction volume. As part of that framework, PhonePe has earmarked a dedicated fund equal to 5 per cent of the MDR it collects specifically for small-merchant expansion, with a particular focus on deep rural markets.

Why Rural India Matters For Fintech Growth

India's digital payments story over the past several years has been dominated by urban and semi-urban growth, with UPI transaction volumes scaling rapidly in cities where smartphone and internet penetration are highest. Rural India, by contrast, still has millions of small merchants, from kirana stores to roadside vendors, who continue to operate largely in cash, either because they lack access to affordable payment devices or because no company has found it commercially worthwhile to onboard them individually.

By committing to a large, dedicated on-roll sales force rather than relying solely on self-service onboarding through its app, PhonePe is betting that human-assisted onboarding, KYC completion and after-sales support are necessary to convert rural merchants who may be less familiar with digital tools. If the rollout proceeds as planned, it would mark one of the largest coordinated pushes yet by a single fintech company to close India's rural digital payments gap, potentially setting a template that rivals in the space may feel pressure to match.

This is an original summary based on public reporting. See our editorial policy for how we source, write, and correct our stories.